My Magic Blog

Discovering your Minor Arcana Card

2018-08-10

If you’ve just got your hands on a tarot card deck, you may be a little confused by all the different types of cards. Perhaps you now understand the major arcana cards but are still a little confused by the minor arcana cards. In this article we will discuss the difference between the major and minor cards. We’ll also answer the question: what arcana are you? This will be in relation to your minor arcana tarot card and what it can say about your life in the short term or long term. So let’s just right in and look at the differences between the two main types of tarot cards.

Differences between the Major and Minor Arcana

The best way to understand the differences between these two types of card is to consider a normal deck of playing cards. How would you divide them up into two groups? The most common way would be considering the suit cards as one group and the face cards as another, right?

This is the same basic difference between arcana cards: the major arcana are the face cards, the special card, and the cards with the most value. In comparison, while the minor tarot cards are still important, they play a small role during any reading and are less powerful.

The Suits

When we explore the minor tarot cards, they will often be referred to as suit cards. Similarly to playing cards, there are four suits, each containing a series of numbered cards (1 to 10) and four court cards. With tarot cards, the face cards are considered part of the suit cards while the major arcana cards are considered higher value than these. Let’s take a look at each of the four suits.

The Cups

The Cups suit, named due to the appearance of cups or goblets on each card, represents emotional issues. This could be in relation to love, sadness, fear, happiness, you name it. The Cups cards can also relate to your relationships but in doing so will reflect your emotional state.

The Swords

The Swords suit can rather unsurprisingly relate to conflict. It doesn’t specifically mean violent conflict or even conflict with another person, it’s possible for these cards to reflect an inner-conflict. They also reflect strength, ability and the need to defend what is yours.

The Wands

The Wands suit holds cards that relate to your decision making. These cards will help you determine what action to take, when to hold back or when to take a leap of faith. These cards provide advice and guidance in relation to general aspects of your life.

The Pentacles

The Pentacles suit relates to your long term goals and desires. These cards are more commonly known for revealing information surrounding your finances or your well-being but can also relates to your relationship but in doing so will typically tie in with a cups card. Now that we’ve covered a basic overview of the minor tarot cards, let’s take a look at which arcana card you’re associated with.

Which Arcana are you?

There are 56 minor arcana cards that can be used in a similar manner as the major arcana cards in determining a hidden aspect of your life. In order to discover this, you will need two things: your tarot cards decks (only the minor arcana cards though) and your date of birth. We’ll walk you through the process step by step so that you don’t have any problems working this out. We’ll start off with your date of birth.

In order to establish which tarot minor arcana card you belong to, we need an aspect of your life that ties you into the universe’s energy: your date of birth. To get a number we can work with, we have to reduce each aspect of your birth date, combine the numbers and then reduce them again until the number is 56 or less.

For example, if you were born on May 12th 1937, we would have the numbers 5, 12, and 1937. To reduce these numbers be combine the single digits giving us 5, 3(1+2) and 20(1+9+3+7). We add these together to get the number 28.

Discovering your Card

So now that we’ve got the number to work with, we need to shuffle the tarot cards minor arcana. Place them face down on the table and mix them up thoroughly with both hands. Keep going until you’re sure that every card has been touched at least once.

You then want to collect the cards back into a pile and from the top, begin placing cards face down one at a time. Only once you get to the number you acquired from your birth date (28 in our example) do you flip the card over to reveal your card.